1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to managing advertising over digital communications networks such as the Internet and satellite and cable digital television, and, more particularly, to software, hardware, and computer systems and methods for building an accurate representation of available advertising space inventory (e.g., available impressions on web pages or the like meeting particular criteria or attributes of a product segment) and for allocating the available inventory in an improved manner to limit cannibalization of overlapping inventory segments.
2. Relevant Background
Use of the Internet and similar communications networks has become ubiquitous with millions of people accessing information and communicating with their computers and other network devices such as wireless phones. Even television has become digital and information and programming is provided to televisions via set top boxes and the like or over the Internet to computers and network devices. Each person that accesses such networks and digital information represents a customer that can be targeted for advertising such as space on the periphery of a web page, a streaming border about a digital image or video, pop up images, and many other forms of Internet and digital media advertising. Briefly, an ongoing problem for service providers such as Internet web service providers and digital television companies is how best to allocate their advertising time and space. Conflicting goals are to sell all advertising space or impressions (e.g., advertising product) that are available but also to sell the advertising product in such a way as to maximize advertising revenue. The following background information is provided to explain the difficulty of managing advertising product due in large part to the complexity of describing available advertising products such as impressions that fit into multiple product segments and offering such impressions to one purchaser necessarily means that the impressions are no longer available to a later purchaser who may have been willing to pay more for the product (e.g., results in “cannibalization” of an advertising product segment).
Advertising on the Internet has become a huge market with annual advertising expenditure in excess of $14 billion in the United States in 2006. When compared to traditional broadcast advertising, the Internet advertising market differs in sophistication with regard to the target audience that a given advertising campaign is intended to reach as well as the variety of metrics used for measuring the advertising goal set by an advertiser or advertising product purchaser. Advertising campaigns are now commonly specified for delivery to specific target audiences, e.g., a market segment, with advertising viewers that have a specified combination of criteria such as people who have a certain age, live in a select locale, have particular interests and hobbies, have a certain income, and/or other criteria or combinations of such criteria. Beyond the domain of Internet advertising, the day has arrived where the broadcast medium is beginning to apply the same sophisticated marketing techniques to the television medium via similar technologies as used by Internet advertisers and sellers of advertising products being implemented in set-top boxes or other access control devices used by cable and satellite broadcasting systems to provide their customers with programming and, increasingly, advertising that is targeted toward particular viewers or customers.
Along with this increase in sophistication demanded by advertisers, the problem of managing the advertising product or impression inventory by the sellers of advertising products also has increased significantly. As in any advertising medium, the amount of advertising inventory available in a given period of time is finite (e.g., there are only so many impressions left available for a particular web site or on web service pages). Contracts are created between advertisers and publishers (e.g., buyers of advertising products or impression inventory) that specify a particular market segment, range of dates for publication of their advertisements, and an advertising goal that, independent of the metrics used to quantify the goal, translate into a certain quantity of the available inventory. Many of these contracts compete for the same limited inventory of advertising products. If two contracts specify the same segment such as men that are under thirty years old that enjoy fishing or some other set of criteria or attributes of the viewers of the advertising, the contracts clearly compete directly for the inventory. Managing such direct competition for advertising product inventory is relatively simple to manage. However, much more complicated problems arise in managing advertising inventory available on the Internet or other digital media such as digital television. For example, even if two contracts specify different segments, they still compete for the same inventory inasmuch as their specified market segments overlap. One example may be a first contract that simply requests that its ads be delivered to a segment made up of viewers that are under thirty years old while a second contract requests its ads be delivered to a segment made up of females under thirty years old. These two inventory segments overlap and fulfilling the first contract typically will result in the sale of inventory in both segments (e.g., cannibalization of the segment having attributes of females under thirty years old to satisfy a contract requesting simply viewers under thirty years old). The complexity of advertising management rapidly increases with the number of attributes that are used to specify market segments and the number of different segments concurrently under contract.
Further, when advertiser demand is high, the total sold inventory of a given publisher property may approach one hundred percent. At this point, accurately managing the inventory becomes a critical component of maximizing advertising revenue. To the extent that these quantities are not managed optimally, revenue is lost. For example, if the available quantity of a given, market segment or advertising product is underestimated, valuable inventory will go unsold, and the seller of such advertising product or inventory loses revenue corresponding to the lost sales. Conversely, if the available quantity of inventory is overestimated, one or more contracts cannot be fully delivered (e.g., there are not enough impressions on web pages for the number of ads that need to be published or delivered according to the contracts). This results in a revenue adjustment or a lengthening of the contract period, which often causes other contracts to fail as it results in other advertising inventory being used to service the previously unfulfilled contract.
Managing these aspects of the inventory is a difficult task that continues to be a challenge to all publishers or sellers of advertising space. The advertising market continues to grow, and Internet publishers are enjoying strong demand for their inventory and as a result are selling a majority of their advertising space. However, the majority of Internet publishers continue to struggle with the various aspects of this problem and, as a result, potential advertising revenue is lost every day. Internet publishers are continuously looking for ways to better manage their advertising inventory such as by better fulfilling contracts with their advertising segments (or segmented inventory) because they understand this may significantly enhance their overall revenue numbers.
As noted above, the advertising inventory being managed is in some cases the advertising impressions being viewed on an Internet site. In this environment, the inventory or advertising product available is commonly measured as the total number of ad spaces on which an advertisement, in any form, can appear anywhere on the pages that make up the web site. This total number is multiplied by the number of times the individual pages are viewed by end users over a given time period, typically a day (i.e., the daily impression count). Each presentation of an individual advertisement in this environment is called an ad “impression”. The individual attributes or criteria that characterize the various advertising products are hereafter referred to interchangeably as variables or the dimensions of the inventory. These attributes can vary significantly between publishing properties such as web sites depending on the type of property and the availability of any additional data available to the publishers that has market value to their potential advertisers (e.g., information on the viewers or users of the web site via cookies or the like). For example, attributes can be location specific representing some aspect of the location of the advertisement within a subset of the content area of a web site. In other cases, the attributes can be time related, such as time of day or day of week. Yet further, the attributes can be geographical, such as city, state, or country attributes or be demographical with attributes such as gender, age, and income. In still other cases, the attributes may include information on a viewer's or user's purchase history with attributes such as a list of recently purchased products or the attributes can be specific to the particular market segment that a particular publisher targets such as with their web site content.
Regardless of the inventory domain or the dimensions that characterize the inventory, there are several critical data points of interest, and providing an accurate estimation of these values or quantities is at the core of accurate inventory management. One such data point is the “total forecast” that can be defined as the total anticipated quantity of inventory for a particular segment of the inventory over a particular time period as projected by the analysis of historical data. In the advertising inventory domain, this number represents the total amount of expected advertising impressions available during the specified period that will meet the criteria of the specified market segment. Market or product segments can also be referred to as product segments or, more simply, advertising products since they are usually sold by publishers as such, and, therefore, these terms are used interchangeably in this document. For example, a product segment may be defined as viewers that are males that are 30 to 40 years old with an impression location anywhere in the hierarchy of web pages making up the finance section of a particular web site over the period of one day for a particular ad space. With all of these criteria or segment parameters in mind, the calculated total forecast number for that advertising product would represent the total amount of impressions that are expected to meet the set of criteria or segment parameters.
The total forecast value may be subdivided into two components. A first component is the “base forecast,” which represents the total forecast quantity as derived directly from recent history. In the Internet advertising domain, the “history” typically includes transaction logs of the information available from the computer servers that serve the advertisements for a particular web site or network of web sites (e.g., ad servers). A second component is the “predicted forecast,” which includes extrapolations of the base forecast forward in time including considering historical growth and also considering seasonality patterns such as sporting events, holiday traffic, or day of the week to accordingly modify the predicted forecast.
One challenge of producing a base forecast involves quantifying all of the products within the publisher's inventory in a way that is accurate but still meets the performance requirements of the system. For smaller inventory sets such as those of small to medium publishers with a total daily volume of perhaps a million total ad impressions per day, it may be acceptable to import the entire inventory set into a computer system for management. However, for larger inventory sets such as those from publishing domains with a daily volume of impressions in the hundreds of millions or billions per day, this is not practical due to the amount of processing time it takes to perform direct analysis on the data. For example, the time to scan and aggregate a billion records in a relational database may take on the order of hours, whereas an order entry system trying to fill an advertisement request might require a one second response time.
Another challenge facing a designer of an advertising management process is that the data needs to be sampled in a way that meets both the required accuracy as well as the required performance metrics of the system. This is a difficult task since representing the inventory with a sample of the data in order to meet the required performance level can reduce the accuracy of the base forecast numbers. According to sampling theory, the reduction in sampling accuracy is directly related to both the size of the sample and the relative scarcity of the segment being measured. Unfortunately, in the advertising domain, the smaller the product segment the more likely it is to have a higher value to a publisher and advertiser. Therefore, the more vulnerable a smaller segment of advertising inventory is to sampling error.
In addition to the total forecast value, another quantity that should be considered in managing Internet and other digital advertising is the “total sold” value or data point, which is typically defined as the total amount of sold inventory for a particular segment of the inventory over a particular time period. This represents the number of impressions for a given advertising product or segment that have already been sold based on previous advertising requests or orders, which also may be referred to as reserved or allocated product or impressions. Generally, the total sold value is relatively simple to manage. For the purposes of the present discussion, the terms “sold” and “allocated” are considered equivalent where reference herein both in text and in equations.
An additional value or quantity that typically is considered when managing Internet or digital advertising is the “total available,” which can be defined as the total amount of remaining inventory that is available for sale. The total available also is limited to the advertising product or impressions that meet the specified criteria of the requested advertising product when considering both the base forecast of the product less the quantity of inventory consumed by previous orders.
Adding to the complexity of managing these values or quantities is the fact that the relationships between the different product segments within a publisher's advertising inventory can differ considerably. Some segments represent subsets of the total inventory that are mutually exclusive. For example, if one segment was for a location anywhere in the finance area of a given web site and another was for a location anywhere in the shopping area, then no single piece of inventory is common to both segments. But some product sets have a hierarchical relationship in which one segment is a total subset of the other. For example, a product representing impressions located anywhere within the shopping section of a site has a hierarchical relationship with the impressions located within the electronics subsection of the shopping area. As noted above, other inventory segments may partially overlap. Market segments characterized by user demographics typically have this property. For example, if one product has dimensions or attributes that its viewers are males of age 30 to 40 years and another product has attributes of age 30 to 40 years living in the San Francisco area, there will be inventory that is common to both sets (i.e., the segments partially overlap but are not fully hierarchical). To the extent that many inventory segments will overlap, in whole or in part, the effects of the sale of a quantity of inventory of one product segment can potentially impact the availability of many others that overlap with it. This is an aspect of managing multi-dimensional inventory that makes it much more complex than the management of conventional inventory and may be thought of as cannibalization.
With overlapping product definitions, the forecast and availability of each product is reported individually. Therefore, when considering the forecast and availability of more than one product, the forecast and availability of all the products taken concurrently will be far less than the sum of all the individual product forecast and the available quantities because many of the products will share some or all of the same inventory. Beyond quantifying all these values accurately, it is important that the inventory management system is fully synchronized with the delivery system so that the delivery system allocates inventory in accordance with the same management methods used to report these metrics.
Hence, there remains a need for improved methods and systems for managing advertising inventory or products (e.g., available ad space or impressions) that are typically defined by a set of dimensions or criteria (e.g., multi-dimensional inventory or products) and that are published or delivered on the Internet or via other digital media such as cable or satellite television. Preferably, such methods and systems would be adapted to provide an enhanced representation of available inventory based on the dimensions or criteria (also sometimes referred to as variables) used to define segments of the advertising inventory or sets of ad impressions. Additionally, the methods and systems preferably would be able to better control or limit cannibalization of various segments to satisfy contracts for inventory while also increasing the ability of a publisher or advertising seller to fulfill contracts (e.g., to provide impressions matching the criteria specified by a buyer or party to a contract for such advertising inventory).